It’s a warm spring afternoon and I’m in a small room, perched on all fours and naked from the waist down. A complete stranger is examining my backside the way a seamstress might eye a garment before it’s altered.

After a few days of throwing around the idea, I had decided to get a Brazilian wax for the first time in my life.

There is something about a new season that makes everything look rosy, even yanking out every pubic hair you have at the follicles, which is what I arranged to do at a wax bar on Queen St. W.

I had asked my mom about her waxing experience, as I had countless girlfriends in preparation before the procedure. It wasn’t encouraging.

“You could not pay me enough money,” my mom said flatly over the phone.

“It’s gonna hurt like hell and you’ll regret it the second they pull out the first hair,” she added. “Besides, you’re a woman. Why would you want to look like a little girl?”

I consider her statement and tell her it’s just one of those things I want to do once, like some people feel about skydiving or climbing Mount Everest.

I want to go to the beach in my bikini without having to think about what’s happening downtown; the summer dream of every pale-skinned dark-haired girl.

I make my appointment and force a friend to come with me to the salon and wait in the lobby, bribing him with beers when we meet with friends later.

“So is a Brazilian the one where they take everything off?” he asks as we walk towards the salon.

“Everything,” I say. “Go big or go home, you know?” I adds, trying not to let the anxiety come through in my voice.

I laughed in the face of taking an Aspirin as every bit of information I read had suggested. After all, I have endured tattoos, sports injuries, marathons and piercings. A Brazilian wax? How painful could it be?

“That’s nuts. Only a woman would do that,” my friend says.

I shoot him dagger eyes for his joking that he knows very well is sexist and meant to get a rise out of me.

Another friend told me she wanted to smack me three ways from Sunday for even making the appointment, saying the politics of the waxing down there were anti-feminist and offensive.

If so, then why do so many women still do it?

In the waiting room none of the many women look like porn stars. Two women in business suits sit near the window, one talking on her BlackBerry and another typing on her phone. Toward the back a woman who looks to be in her 50s with grey hair, reads a novel and beside her is a middle-aged woman with a toddler, flipping through a magazine and feeding the kid Cheerios.

My friend comes into the salon, takes one look at the cutesy names for different types of waxes on a big board near the front and informs that he’ll be in the record store down the street.

A nice women at the counter tells me to relax and take a seat. Soon a petite woman with dark hair and a strong Latin American accent calls my name. She smiles and says her name is Rita and she’ll be doing my procedure today. Her hands are small and soft. She doesn’t look like someone who is capable of inflicting terrible pain. I relax, naively, not knowing the hell that awaits me.

Rita gets me to lay down on a bed in a small room that smells like a Bath & Body Works. I pull up my dress and feel like I’m at a doctor’s office but more self-conscious. The paper crinkles under me and I stare up at the white ceiling, like at the dentist.

I ask her if she likes her job and she says yes, she gets to meet a lot of people this way. She also meets a lot of lady parts, I say, and I ask if she’s learned anything examining the vaginas of thousands of women.

“They all look the same to me!” she says with a quick hand swoosh, and I realize my self-consciousness is a waste of energy.

We chat about the characters she’s met and her schedule as she puts the first dollop of warm, blue wax on a small strip of my inner thigh, all the while she is insisting that it won’t hurt badly.

Right away it feels wrong to have something so warm in such a sensitive area. We chat away as the wax dries and then all of a sudden out of nowhere, ‘RRRIIPPPP!’

I yelp an expletive as throngs of pain grip my entire body. Tears well up in my eyes. It feels like a million paper cuts all at once.

“RITA!” I gasp. “You can’t just rip! You need to tell me when it’s coming!”

“Give me a minute to brace myself first!” I say, adding, “And Rita, you liar! That hurt like hell! I’m a reporter, truth, Rita, be real with me,” I say.

“OK, OK, OK,” she says, as she puts the next dollop of wax on me.

“Well this part,” she sighs. “This is really going to hurt.”

I whimper.

“Well you wanted me to say!” she exclaims, throwing her hands in the air.

I grip the wall this time, looking for any other nail marks from previous customers. There are none.

I thought the process would be quick. But no. The wax dries and becomes thick and Rita has to start the strip by grabbing a piece of it and then yanking it up a few times to get it going.

“OK, sweetie, here we go,” she says,

‘RIIIPPP!’

I gasp again and tears flow down my cheeks. My lower abdomen is throbbing with pain. Like a migraine, but down there.

“Rita do you have kids?” I ask breathlessly, before she goes to rip the next strip of wax.

“Yes, hon, two. Why?”

‘RIIIIPPP!’

I weep quietly.

“Having them,” I sputter, “Better or worse than the pain of this?” I ask through clenched teeth.

She lets out a huge belly laugh.

“Oh hon, this is nothing compared to that,” she says, sloshing on more wax.

“I am never having kids,” I declare. “How did you do it?”

“Well,” she considers for a second. “I just thought about what the baby’s face would look like, and that kept me going.”

“So should I just keep thinking of what it will look like, when it’s done?” I ask.

“Yes, hon. Keep thinking of that,” she laughs. She pulls another strip off and I wish for a world’s worth of pain killers in my blood stream. I feel dizzy and with each rip I feel my lunch lurching in my stomach.

I think it is very possible that I could die on this very table. I think about the injustice of dying before I can clean my messy desk at work, or replace my roommate’s carton of Greek yogurt, I finished before I left this morning.

Rita calls out, “All done!”

I open my eyes and she comes in closer to eye her work. Satisfied she nods and grabs a little mirror.

“Wanna see?”

She places the mirror down there, so I can see the reflection, like when you get a haircut and the hairdresser wants to show you the back.

I squeeze my eyes shut and then open them.

I am horrified.

Hairless as the day I was born, a swollen bloody mess reflects back at me. Pain still shoots up my body when I shift.

I whimper and Rita raises her eyebrows.

“You like?” she asks.

My eyes fill with tears.

“What you don’t like?” She sounds offended.

“I, I look like a 5-year-old boy whose been stung by like, a million bees,” I stammer.

Rita sighs.

She lectures me on what I can and can’t do: no running for a day, take it easy, wear comfortable things. She tells me I will be hair free for about four weeks, says it was nice meeting me and just as quickly as she came, she’s gone.

I stumble out into the light of Queen St. like a hero in a horror movie who has just survived a zombie apocalypse.